My mommy always said there were no monsters - no real ones - but there are.
Ripley has been found in deep space by a salvage ship and brought back to a space station to be awoken from her 57 year sleep. Here she is mortified to find that the planet on which herself and her now deceased Nostromo crew found the Alien, LV-426, has been colonised by Weyland-Yutani Company. Suffice to say that when The Company representative, Burke, tells her that all contact is lost, she's not in the least bit surprised. Unable to get anyone to believe her about what happened to the Nostromo crew, Ripley is cajoled into going back to LV-426 with a crack team of space marines to seek, destroy or rescue...
How do you make a sequel to one of the finest, most loved modern era films ever? This was something that director James Cameron must have pondered on many a dark night once he had agreed to make Aliens. The answer was to rightly not copy the format so brilliantly laid down by Ridley Scott and his team for Alien, but to embrace its mood and enhance it with thrills spills and exhilaration. This was only Cameron's third feature length movie, and here he was working with the crew who had made Scott's movie so special. Also writing as well as directing, this could have gone very wrong indeed, but Cameron rose to the challenge admirably and set up his marker on how his film would succeed. Keep the premise simple and seamlessly connected to Scott's film, and lets have more. Not just one bad ass acid bleeding alien, but an army of them, and their mother too!
They mostly come at night - mostly.
Where Alien was a splicing of sci-fi wonderment and basic horror terrors, Aliens is a blend of war film staples to compliment both of those earlier picture things. Thus in keeping with Cameron's more is more work in progress skeleton. Another thing that Cameron instinctively called right was to make Aliens about Ripley (Sigorney Weaver simply brilliant), it's her story. Be it a parental thread or a feminist heroine fighting off the phallic hoards, cinema got in Ripley's extension one of its finest and strongest female characters ever (Weaver was nominated for Best Actress but lost out to Marlee Matlin for Children of a Lesser God).
Thematically Aliens has been pored over in regards to metaphors about Vietnam, foreign policy and corporate greed at any cost, and rest assured that Aliens isn't merely one big excuse for a shoot them up bonanza. But realistically, and explaining why it was such a huge box office success, it's with the thrills and terror that Aliens most succeeds. The action scenes are slick and at times breath taking, and the tension is often palpable. None more so as we enter the film at the half way point, because here we realise that we have characters to care about. Blood, brains and brawn, all led by a heroine of considerable guile and guts. 10/10